Podcast 39 - Tragedy, Comedy, and the Effects of Materialism
November 30th, 2007 by Richard CockrumOften, as we look at our lives and the lives of those around us we think Hey. This bit about our beliefs creating our reality is a crock. We’ve tried thinking ‘happy thoughts’. We visualized our selves in different life circumstances that appear more desirable to us than our current actuality. Yet still, the baby cries when we’re tired. The car breaks down when we had plans to go out of town. Our spouse seems more attracted to the movie star of the moment than they are to us.
I thought it may be helpful to illustrate how our beliefs can create our world on a societal level by looking at how a root belief can affect the development of a culture. In this case, the root belief is whether we are purely creatures of matter or not. Materialism is not new in the world. There is evidence of it in literature going back millenia. Until the past century or so it appears that it was a minority opinion. The effective development of physics from the nineteenth century led to attempts to use some of it’s underlying theses to explain some of the whys of life, as well as the whats and hows. As a result, materialism has become a root belief for a large segment of the population in the West. The materialization and mechanization of the soul has had painful, deleterious effects on the development of our culture. In this podcast I use the literary concepts of tragedy and comedy to illustrate why this is so.
This episode of the Shards of Consciousness podcast is based on a post I wrote in January, 2007 called Is Your Life a Tragedy or Comedy?.
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December 10th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Rick,
Great post, and “Stranger Than Fiction” is spectacular.
Mike
December 10th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Thank you, Mike.
I’m not a big Will Ferrell fan, but I was very pleasantly surprised by Stranger Than Fiction. It may go down as the best film in which he appeared. The acting was good. The cinematography was excellent. It obviously got me thinking.
One more strange thing about the film. If you go to its page on imdb, neither Dustin Hoffman nor Emma Thompson are listed as being in the film until you get to the second page. Odd considering they were main characters.